The Shinjuku Rashomon killing

The Shinjuku Rashomon killing is a turning point in Tenji Nakamura’s postwar flight. In the ruins of Tokyo, a newspaper identifies him as a possible Class B war criminal; soon afterward, he enters a bomb-damaged room where an American serviceman has been killed and strikes down a teenage boy who attacks him. He then alters the evidence, takes money, and escapes the city. The episode connects his wartime role in the railway project to a postwar life organized around evasion, hunger, and the deliberate suppression of memory.

The warrant and the ruined city

Two and a half months after demobilization, Nakamura survives among the wreckage of Tokyo by salvaging timber and selling it to a charcoal burner. His possessions include a crowbar, which serves both as a tool for pulling apart damaged buildings and as protection. Hunger shapes the narrow terms of his days: after finding stale acorns in the rubble, he has gone without food again. Against this immediate want, a newspaper brings the threat of his past into focus.

The paper reports that American authorities are issuing warrants for former prisoner-of-war camp staff in connection with possible war crimes. Nakamura finds his own name among the wanted suspects. He rejects the accusation and regards the Americans as the true criminals, but his anger does not quiet his fear that they are closing in. He is determined to avoid arrest and execution, and believes that survival depends on remaining free. The warrant turns his uncertain existence in the ruins into an active flight from a legal reckoning.

That flight follows his service as a major in the railway regiment. The railway had been built through forced labor under orders that placed completion above the lives of the workers. Its Australian prisoners remained bound to Dorrigo Evans’ J Force even as deaths reduced their number; the men’s shared identity endured as a way of holding on to the living and the dead. Nakamura’s postwar predicament is distinct from the prisoners’ suffering, but the railway’s legacy shadows the warrant: he is now one of the former camp staff whom the authorities are seeking.

The encounter at Shinjuku Rashomon

Taking shelter near the ruined archway known as Shinjuku Rashomon, Nakamura hears a woman and follows the sound through the rubble. From a small opening, he sees a teenage boy with a kitchen knife, a pan pan girl, and the body of an American serviceman. The girl is angry with the boy over the killing. Nakamura registers the scene, but what holds his attention is on a makeshift table: two gyoza dumplings and a bar of American chocolate. Remembering dumplings from his earlier service in Manchukuo, he fixes on the food as a chance to satisfy his hunger.

Nakamura enters the room with his crowbar. When the boy rushes at him with the knife, Nakamura swings the bar and kills him. The sudden violence is presented through Nakamura’s narrowed perception: the encounter becomes a confrontation he must survive, while the food remains his immediate objective. Afterward, he takes the dumplings and eats them as he watches the girl. Hunger does not excuse the killing, but it helps define the episode’s abrupt, degraded scale: amid the wreckage of a capital and the danger of a war-crimes investigation, his attention has contracted to a meal and the next means of escape.

Concealment and escape

Nakamura recognizes that two deaths in the room could bring the police and Americans closer to him. He uses the crowbar to arrange the scene so that it will suggest a struggle between the American and a thief, then leaves without identifying himself. The girl calls after him with an account in which the boy had been trying to protect her. Nakamura is not interested in hearing her explanation. When she reaches for him as he tries to climb out, he pushes her away and threatens her with a brick. The encounter ends not with any attempt to establish what happened, but with his effort to prevent the surviving witness from disrupting his escape.

Outside, Nakamura returns to the practical business of evasion. The money he takes from the girl pays for false identity papers; selling her clothes provides enough to buy a train ticket to Kobe. In a third-class carriage with its windows blown out, he travels away from his identity as former railway-regiment major Tenji Nakamura and toward a new one, as former Imperial Japanese Army private Yoshio Kimura. The killing thus leads directly to a change of name and a change of place, but not to security. In Kobe he continues to survive through petty theft and black-market dealings, and fear of recognition keeps him wary.

Survival and erasure

The scene gives physical form to Nakamura’s belief that survival requires forgetting. After the killings, he treats the dead as no longer meaningful faces and concentrates instead on the danger their presence creates for him. His practical arrangement of the scene extends that refusal: the deaths become a cover story, and the witness becomes a threat to be silenced. His actions are not simply an escape from arrest; they show how his insistence on survival becomes a means of evading responsibility.

That private evasion contrasts with the book’s insistence on the scale of the railway’s human cost. No complete count exists for those who died building it, and the names of many laborers have already been lost. The prisoners of Dorrigo Evans’ J Force, by contrast, cling to their identity as a group because survival does not erase their obligation to remember their dead. Nakamura’s effort to detach himself from the past offers a harsher counterpoint: in his account of survival, forgetting is not an accidental consequence of time but a chosen tactic.

The killing does not end his exposure to the war-crimes trials. In Kobe, he follows reports of proceedings and reads that a Japanese soldier who beat a prisoner of war has been convicted and hanged. He cannot understand the verdict. That response shows the distance between his conviction that he is innocent and the authorities’ pursuit of former camp personnel. The Shinjuku Rashomon episode therefore begins his flight under a false identity without resolving the question of guilt; it leaves him moving through the postwar ruins, still measuring every encounter by its threat to his survival.